WatersWorks by John K. Waters

MyEclipse Also Turns 10

The Eclipse open source community is celebrating a birthday this month, as we reported last week. So is one of the founding members of the Eclipse Foundation: Genuitec announced the availability of version 10.0 of its MyEclipse Java EE IDE.

The Flower Mound, Texas-based Genuitec's MyEclipse, is both a Java EE IDE and a Web development tool suite for the Eclipse platform. The company promotes the tool for developers using UML, JSP, XML, Struts, JSF and EJBs. It supports Ajax, Web Services development, Java Persistence, extended database support and application server integration.

MyEclipse Workbench Enterprise Edition 10.0 is built on Eclipse Indigo (v3.7, released in June), and it continues the company's support for the Apache Maven build automation and software comprehension technology.

The production release supports HTML5 and Java EE6, and comes with new support for JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, Eclipselink 2.1 and Apache's OpenJPA 2.0 release. The company overhauled the MyEclipse in-workspace deployment in this release, making it easier to collaborate and share their workspace settings or user profiles among team members. MyEclipse Blue Edition supports the latest build of WebSphere Portal Server 7.0, WebSphere 8, as well as WebSphere 6.1 and 7. IBM's DB2 series is supported with database integration connectors on both Windows and Linux operating systems. My Eclipse for Spring incorporates a suite of Spring-specific add-ons for Eclipse, including bean wizards, bean editors, Spring configuration editors, Spring Web Flow editors, content assist, refactoring support, project validation, Spring DSL and bean dependency graphs.

I've had the pleasure of interviewing MyEclipse CEO Maher Masri several times, and I've found him to be a keen observer of the Eclipse ecosystem. In the press release for this product announcement, he said, "Genuitec was born in 2001 out of sheer frustration that the tools market did not do a better job supporting developers, so in 2003 -- with the founding of the Eclipse Foundation -- we introduced MyEclipse... The mission of Genuitec has remained the same over these 10 years: to give developers an enterprise technology driven by their demands at a price they can pay out of their own pocket if necessary...."

When I talked with Masri in 2008 about the MyEclipse 7.0 release, he said, "Most people think of Eclipse as a platform for development tools. We subscribe to the idea that Eclipse can be a framework for any kind of application."

In 2007, when I talked with Masri about the then-new Eclipse Pulse, an online social network and product catalog combo for Eclipse users, he observed, "The Eclipse Foundation walks a fine line between providing a platform and consuming its own ecosystem. It relies on companies like us to take that work forward -- to provide tooling and technologies on top of the platform, and to consume that platform. And that enlarges the overall ecosystem."

When I talked with Masri back in 2005 about MyEclipse 5.0, he said, "The tooling is just a stepping stone into what is becoming a very exciting market."